Tag: oven

New Year. Three main courses in the oven: the recipes – Italian Cuisine

Preparing the New Year's Eve dinner is always laborious. One way to optimize times is to make the oven the protagonist in the preparation of main courses. Here are three perfect recipes for the occasion

When the time comes to get in the kitchen to baste the New Year's Eve dinner, time risks turning into a guillotine. But there is a way to optimize times, without neglecting tradition: to make the oven protagonist of the preparation of New Year's seconds. Thus, while the cotechino, lo shin or the sardines they cook, your hands are free to make, for example, cold appetizers or a first course with one of the many lucky foods.

In crust, the alternative version of cotechino

A great classic that cannot be missing from the New Year's menu is the cotechino with lentils. A alternative version of the traditional recipe, which can be prepared in the oven, is the one in a puff pastry crust. The ingredients for four people are a cotechino of about 500 grams, a roll of puff pastry, 450 grams of spinach already cleaned, two eggs, 20 grams of grated Parmesan cheese, a clove of garlic, extra virgin olive oil, salt, pepper , nutmeg and sesame seeds.

First of all cook the cotechino in plenty of water, according to the times indicated on the package or by your butcher. Drain it and remove the casing. Meanwhile, in another pot of boiling salted water, boil the spinach. When they become tender, drain them, squeeze them and sauté them in a pan with a drizzle of oil and a clove of garlic. Allow them to cool, then transfer them to the mixer and blend them with the parmesan, egg, a pinch of salt, pepper and nutmeg. At this point, unroll the puff pastry and spread over the Spinach Cream, leaving an inch of border on all sides. Lay the cotechino on one end and roll up, tightening the sheet well. Close the side edges, brush the surface with egg yolk, sprinkle with sesame seeds and bake at 200 ° for about 25 minutes.

New Year's courses in the oven, the inevitable shank

Another dish that is always very popular on New Year's Eve is it pork knuckle. Quick to prepare, it needs instead of more than an hour of cooking in the oven. Four small shins are needed for four people, 80 grams of butter, an onion, two cloves of garlic, a sprig of rosemary, a glass of dry white wine, a liter of broth, extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper.

Quickly rinse the shanks under running water and place them in a pan covered with parchment paper with the butter, rosemary, onion cut in half, oil and peeled cloves of garlic. Bake at 200 degrees and as soon as they have taken a little color, pour in the white wine. When this has faded, repeat the operation with the broth from time to time, so that the meat never stays dry. At the end of cooking it should, in fact, be tender and moist. To accompany the shanks, the tasty baked potatoes are excellent.

Sarde a beccafico, for those who do not want to give up fish

The Sarde A Beccafico they are perfect for those who want to opt for a fish-based second New Year's Eve. Four people need 500 grams of fresh sardines, an orange, two teaspoons of honey and a few bay leaves. For the filling 100 grams of breadcrumbs, 40 grams of sultanas, 40 grams of pine nuts, two anchovies, a teaspoon of sugar, a sprig of parsley, a clove of garlic, extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper.

First of all turn on the oven at 200 ° and put soaking the raisins. Then proceed with the cleaning of sardines and once ready open them like a book. In a pan with a drizzle of oil, toast the breadcrumbs, then transfer it to a bowl and add the oil, anchovies, chopped parsley and garlic, pine nuts, pepper, salt and sugar. Mix everything until you get a homogeneous compound. Put a teaspoon of filling on each sardine and roll it up on itself. Then grease a baking dish with a drizzle of oil, arrange the stuffed sardines, separating them from each other with bay leaves, sprinkle with orange juice, a little more oil and honey. Bake in the oven at 180 degrees for about twenty minutes.

Our recipes

Recipe Tart without oven with two chocolates – Italian Cuisine

Ingredients

250 g dark chocolate
250 g gianduia chocolate
200 g fresh cream
50 g puffed rice
25 g chopped hazelnuts

Duration: 45 min

Level: Medium

Doses: 8 people

FOR THE BASE
You do melt the chopped dark chocolate and mix it with the puffed rice and chopped hazelnuts, obtaining a kind of dough.
Lined a ring mold (ø 22 cm) with baking paper, on the bottom and on the edges, then distribute the puffed rice mixture so as to cover the bottom of the mold and the edge, for a height of 2 cm, as if it were a shortcrust pastry shell. Put it to rest in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.

FOR THE GANACHE
Chop gianduia chocolate and collect it in a bowl.
Heat the cream, pour it over the chocolate and stir until melted. Wait for the ganache obtained to drop below 30 ° C, then pour it into the puffed rice shell.
Put the cake to consolidate in the refrigerator overnight.
Serve it completing as desired with praline hazelnuts, whole and chopped.

The bread that is made once a year in the collective oven – Italian Cuisine

Pan ner is the bread that is prepared in the collective ovens of the mountain villages in the Aosta Valley in the period from October to November

In the Aosta Valley there is a bread that is made only once a year. And the pan ner, which is consumed in various ways even in the following months, from aperitifs to desserts. It is usually prepared in the village's common oven on a Saturday in November, when the temperature is perfect for drying the loaves.

The preparation of the pan ner, a real ritual

Pan ner dates back to the times when no one in the mountain villages had an oven at home. So once a year we gathered in the collective oven, the one used by the families of the village or the valley, to prepare the pan ner. In fact, in every village, even if tiny, there was at least one large wood-burning oven available to the community, or to anyone who needed it. Sharing is the first law of the mountain people! Basically it is a wholemeal black bread, kneaded by hand with mother yeast (usually when there is a waning moon), with half rye is half wheat, often grown in their own fields. Once cooked, the pan ner rests in barns, in large cupboards where it dries on special wooden racks called ratelì. In this way it is kept for a whole year, also thanks to the cool, dry and windy climate. But as the days go by, of course, the pan becomes harder and harder, which is why a kind of guillotine is needed to cut it. copapàn. Over time, even if the ovens have arrived in the homes of some families (not all!), The tradition of preparing pan ner once a year in the shared oven continues, during a day that is sacred to all. Because it has now become a real ritual, from which the Aosta Valley people have no intention of separating, indeed; each town organizes a party in his honor, on different days depending on the area, but almost always between October and December, when the climate is ideal for all the rites of passage that the pan ner must perform.

The value of bread in the Aosta Valley

For the people of Aosta Valley, bread is linked to a piece of history, of their history of sharing and mutual help. For this reason, in the Aosta Valley, bread is closely linked to the sacred sphere and to ritual moments; for example, it is still given to children during baptism, who dedicated a poem to it for the occasion.

At the town hospital
I don't want white bread,
And the best gift they bring me is bread,
But … the bread of other times,
The bread that grandfather made;
The black bread, very hard, very thick,
The bread of my early years.
Hard, I like to eat it,
It tastes better than the biscuit!
Hard I like to watch it
Black bread is my friend!
(Marie Coudre, Our Dzen Patoué)

Just think that if for years in the rest of Italy they craved white and soft bread, here they have never stopped producing black and hard bread, also because over time it has become a precious and fundamental ingredient for many dishes in the kitchen. Even starting from its crumbs!

The pan ner in the kitchen: seupe and pan i crap

Pan ner looks like a very hard bread, usually cut into irregular pieces. It is almost always already on the table when you sit in a restaurant, so it can also be consumed alone as an aperitif. Alternatively, the sliced bread is perfect for the preparation of some seupe, which in the Aosta Valley are both first and single dish; in fact, they are a great classic of the Aosta Valley tradition, which in the absence of pasta, has always made its availability and differences a wealth in the kitchen. Thus the pan ner, almost always after being soaked in broth or milk, depending on the recipe, becomes the main ingredient of seupa de l’ano, that is, of the donkey; or of seupa of Cogne with stale black bread cut into small cubes, onion, butter, meat broth, fontina cheese and cinnamon; but also of a sweet seupe, like the seupa freida with red wine, sugar or honey; or, again, the more famous and delicious seupa à la vapelenentse, which takes its name from the valley of the same name. A similar version is found by Denise Marcoz at Lo Grand Baöu restaurant: and the seupa i plat, which has always been prepared in his family for parties or weddings. The ingredients are practically the same: bread, fontina cheese, broth, cabbage, cinnamon, with the difference that it is not baked in the oven, but on the stove for hours until the ingredients are perfectly blended and amalgamated. Finally, because nothing is thrown away: from the crumbs of pan ner the pan i crap, or crapt (depending on the dialect of patois spoken), a very popular dessert in the Aosta Valley, which perfectly reflects the spirit of recovery of mountain cuisine. The remaining crumbs of the bread are dipped in butter during clarification, ie during the preparation of the "beuro coulo“, And then covered with sugar. You can also add chestnuts, dried fruit, fennel seeds and candied fruit to the pan i crap: we will thus be faced with one of the best and most Aosta Valley mountain sweets there is.

As an accompaniment we recommend the red Saint'Ours dell 'Noussan Farm by Franco and Gabriella, in Saint Christophe, one of the best expressions of natural Aosta Valley wine, a growing sector to be discovered.